Persian Architectural Revivals in the British Raj and Qajar Iran

Abstract

This essay traces the Persian artistic revival of two separate but interdependent communities: the Parsis of the British Raj and the reformist Muslims and Zoroastrians of Qajar Iran. The two communities, with their own distinct, though at times overlapping, art historical developments, conceived and erected architectural edifices from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s. In a typically nineteenth-century eclectic style, each aimed to appeal to a (differing) notion of the Persianate and, thus, to revive the grandeur of antique Iran at the service of divergent ideologies.